Lone Star (10 page)

“I have family near Riga,” Moody said. “I want you to visit them. I told them a lot about you. You can bring them a letter from me, and a package.”

“You know, Moody, there's something we have in this country called the United States Postal Service—”

“Not interested. And don't be fresh. Also, there is an orphanage in a Latvian town called Liepaja. The town has had a painful history with the Communists, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, the young people there have not been doing so well. Many American families sponsor children from Eastern Europe to come live here. Your parents have been thinking of sponsoring such a child.”

“Don't look so shocked, honey,” Jimmy said. “We meant to talk to you about it. We just didn't get a chance to.” He glared at his mother, who ignored him.

“Your parents would like you to visit this orphanage. Maybe
you can find them a suitable boy there. Age doesn't matter very much, but it must be a boy. Older is better. Not too old. Six or seven. The four of you kids can stay with my relatives. It will make them happy and stretch your lodging budget. Riga is a wonderful historic city. You'll love it. A win-win, if you ask me.”

Chloe shook her head. Lose-lose is what it sounded like. Worse, Moody wasn't finished. There didn't seem to be a finality to her wild words.

“And,” Moody continued, “after you finish helping your parents, I'd like you to do something for me.”

“Other than visit your family?”

“You have it wrong. They're doing you a favor, not the other way around. You won't be forced to stay in places unsuitable for a young lady.” The old woman kneaded her creased and square hands. “A long time ago, before the war, I had a best friend like you and a sweetheart like you. When war broke out in Poland, we knew we were going to get squeezed by the Russians on one side and Germans on the other. We ran from Riga and hid out in the countryside. Our plan was to get to the Baltic Sea, make our way to one of the Scandinavian countries, and board a ship bound for the West. But we didn't realize how much of the continent Hitler and Stalin already had in their grip. We were in Kaunas, northwest of Vilnius, when we got caught by the Soviets and taken to the Jewish ghetto. We were there two years, until 1941 when the Germans came. We all thought we were lucky we weren't in Vilnius because there was a massacre there, near Ponary. Everyone died. They put us on a train bound for the Bialystok ghetto. A year later there was an uprising. But by that time, most of the Jews had already been taken to a transit camp nearby. Do you know the name of that transit camp, Chloe?”

“Of course I don't, Moody.”

“Treblinka.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“What about you?” Chloe asked. She couldn't believe how little she knew about her grandmother's past.

“I'm not Jewish,” Moody said. “Though I reckon that meant little to the Germans. What might have meant more is that I made boots for them. Footwear for the German soldier. I was quite good. Perhaps that helped me.” She spoke matter-of-factly, looking at the gnarled hands that once made boots for the Wehrmacht. “How little I understood life. I really believed after the war I would find my friends, my lover, see them again. I didn't know then that Treblinka was like pancreatic cancer. No one survives. Some things just swallow you whole. You don't know that, don't understand that. Like me. But someday you will.”

Chloe didn't know what to say. Questioningly she opened her hands. “I know that, Moody,” she said quietly. “We all know that, we understand.” She didn't look at her parents.

Moody waved at her, her old hand slightly trembling. “I'm not talking about that.” She paused. “After Latvia, I'd like the four of you to travel by train and visit Treblinka. Bring my love some red roses. There must be a mass grave around there. After that, you can do what you like. You might want to visit Warsaw, or Auschwitz in southern Poland, but that's your business. You have three items on your action list. Liepaja for your mother and father, Riga for my family, and flowers in Treblinka for me. You do those things, and I will help pay for your trip.”

“I have my own money, Moody,” Chloe mumbled in response, as if that was the only thing she'd heard.

“Oh, sure you do, Miss Moneybags,” Moody said. “But you know who doesn't have their own money? Hannah. You know who else? Blake and Mason. I hear their mother plans to tap into her life savings to buy them the plane tickets. You can't travel through Europe on the kindness of strangers, Chloe.”

“You're going to pay for all of us to go?”

“Well, let's just say you're not going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton. You'll bring your own money for food, incidentals. But your travel expenses and your lodging expenses, yes, I will take care of.”

Chloe shook her head. “Moody, I don't want to go to Riga.”
Or to an orphanage! She scowled at her stoic mother, at her father sitting like a sad sack next to her. “My friends will never go for it.” Chloe was thinking of Blake especially. “They'd rather not go at all than go to Poland.”

“Child, I think you're mistaking what this is,” Moody said. “Is this how your mother allows you to speak to her? This isn't a negotiation. It's an offer. Take it. Or leave it. You want careless Barcelona? Fine. You'll have to get to it through my home country. And through Poland. Barcelona through Treblinka.”

“But . . .”

“Or you don't go.”

Chloe frowned, perplexed, maddened, upset. “Why would you pay for my friends to go with me?”

“It's my graduation present to you,” Moody said. “You've been absent from my life these last few years”—she glared at Jimmy who glared right back—“and I would like to fix that. I'm not as young as I used to be. I don't want your father's irrational anger at me to stop you from taking this historic trip. Despite what your parents say, Europe is worth it, as long as Barcelona is not the only thing you see. So there it is. But without your friends you can't go.”

“Not irrational, Mom,” said Jimmy.

“Oh, yes,” Moody said. “Chloe is your daughter, like Kenny was my son, like you're my son. Why couldn't you ever understand that?”

“Chloe is a very good daughter,” said Jimmy.

“You're not such a good son,” Moody said. “What son can stay angry at his mother this long? Kenny wasn't a good man, but he was a good son. Better than you. He didn't stay mad at me for seven years. That's a sin, you know. It's bad luck.”

“We've had about all we can handle of that, thanks to him,” Jimmy said as if spitting. “Us, Burt, Janice, their boys. Bad luck well and truly covered, Mom.”

“Listen, if I spoiled him, all right, but I spoiled all you kids.
He wasn't special. You wanted me to love him less than you because he wasn't as good a boy? He was still my son! I had it rough growing up. I wanted it to be easier for my own children. Why is that so hard to understand?” She raised her hand. “Stop arguing with me, Jimmy. I'm done with it. I didn't come here for that. We've yelled all we can yell. Help your child, spoil your child, or take me home. That's
your
choice.”

Chloe could see her mother making intense beseeching eyes at her father from across the table. Head bent, Jimmy wasn't looking at anybody.

Moody turned her attention back to Chloe. “I advised your parents not to keep you from going. Even though you are only eighteen or already eighteen or whatever it is you say, I told them that you should try to look for the answer to the fundamental question before you.”

“What question is that?” Chloe asked in an exhausted voice.

“What meaning does your finite existence have in this infinite world?”

Deeply, uncomfortably Chloe breathed.

“You keep telling your mother and father you want to see things with your own eyes,” the old woman continued. “So go see them. Do you only want to see the water and the waves?”

Yes?

“Do you only want to hear the cathedral bells?”

Um, yes?

“What about examining for five minutes your place in the world? What it means to be alive? What it means to be dead?”

“Enough, Mom,” Jimmy said in a voice more exasperated and tired than Chloe's. “Unlike some others we won't mention, Chloe gets it.” He turned to his daughter. “It's not ideal, Chloe-bear,” he said, putting his arm around her. “It's called life. You endure a lot of stuff you don't care about, but then, if you're lucky, you get what you want.” Jimmy's eye caught Lang's.

Chloe took a few minutes to compose herself before she
spoke. “Moody, Mom, Dad, do you guys have any idea how far Riga is from Barcelona?”

Moody smiled with a full set of dentures. “Yes,” she said. “A train ride away across all of Europe, just like they did it in the war days.”

T
HAT NIGHT UP IN THE ATTIC
L
ANG SAT ON
C
HLOE'S BED.
“Your father doesn't want you to be upset. He thinks we were too hard on you. Some police chief. He's gone soft. The fight has gone out of him.”

“I wonder why,” Chloe muttered.

“We don't want you to be disappointed,” Lang said. “Dad and I don't fully understand why you want to go, but then we're not meant to, are we? I almost wonder if you yourself know. And that's all right, too. If you think you need to go to Barcelona to discover what you want and who you are, then who are your father and I to stand in your way? Your acceptance of Moody's generous terms is wise. I know you're worried about your friends not wanting to go to Latvia, but I think they're going to surprise you. Besides, what choice do you have, really?”

“Not go?”

Lang nodded. “That will make your father happy,” she said. “In any case, everyone agrees the boys should go with you. Burt, Janice, Moody. They'll keep you safe. Your father and I won't argue this anymore. If you must go, then better with them. Soon you'll be far away, and they'll still be here saving up for that junk-hauling truck they won't be able to afford because they've spent the summer frittering away their money in Barcelona with you.”

“You mean in Poland with me. In Latvia with me. Trudging
through graveyards and death museums. And orphanages. What fun.”

Lang remained unfazed. “Europe is your parting gift to your friends. Now you can say goodbye to them the way you're meant to. Abroad. And I hope when you come back, you'll see one or two obvious things in a different way. Though I told Moody and your father, I wouldn't count on self-discovery. I barely count on you coming back in one piece.”

“Nice, Mom.”

Lang patted the pink quilt above Chloe's leg. “This is our gift to you, letting you go. Your dad and I are proud of you. You've been a good girl. We wanted to reward you for not disappointing us the way other parents have been disappointed.”

“Like Terri?”

“Not Terri. I think she's rather fond of her daughter. And Terri works the hardest in that family. That's why she doesn't give a damn about the raccoons and dinner and Hannah's homework. When you have to care desperately about bringing home the bacon, you're hardly going to be bothered about who cooks it or what species eat it.”

“Who do you mean, then? Mason and Blake? But you love Janice.”

“There you go again, putting words in our mouths and feelings into our hearts. I didn't say Janice. I don't mean anybody in particular. I'm just saying. We thank you for not letting us down.”

“Not letting you down how? By not dying?” Chloe was disappointed in herself. With her mother, and only with her mother (and maybe a little bit with Blake), she sometimes had trouble hiding her tortured heart.

A composed Lang said nothing.

For a few minutes, neither of them spoke.

“Just stay safe, all right?” Lang said quietly. “As safe as you can.”

“Mom, why do you want me to find you a strange boy?” Chloe whispered.

“Not strange,” Lang said. “Just someone who might need a little help. Someone you think your father and I might like. We're not adopting him, Chloe. We're sponsoring him. What are you worried about?”

“I'm not worried.”

Lang got up. “In this one way I echo Flannery O'Connor,” she said. “For the last eighteen years, my avocation has been raising peacocks. This requires everything of the peacocks and very little of me. Time is always at hand. Especially now that the last surviving peacock is leaving.”

The conversation was over. Lang smoothed out Chloe's blanket and bent down to kiss her head. “How was the cemetery?”

“Fine. Moody insisted on putting
my
flowers on Uncle Kenny's grave.”

Lang sighed as she took the railing to descend the steep attic stairs. “Why not? I do.”

W
HEN
C
HLOE WAS ELEVEN HER UNCLE
K
ENNY DIED.
H
E WAS
a wild one, lived small, died small. He was cremated and a portion of his ashes were interred in Fryeburg's rural cemetery, while the rest were flown to Kilkenny to be buried in the family plot. Chloe's parents flew to Ireland for his burial. Chloe got excited. Then she found out she wasn't going.

They were gone a month.

“Must have been some funeral,” she said when her parents returned, all flushed and refreshed, as if they'd been on a honeymoon. They showed her photos of Dublin and Limerick, of glens and castle ruins, of moors and churches and pubs with names like the Hazy Peacock and the Rusty Swan. They began inexplicably to refer to the time away as a “trip of a lifetime.”

Chloe didn't know what that meant, but she did internalize it.

Seven years later no one spoke of that trip of a lifetime, or of Kenny, or Kilkenny, or glens, or moors. Most of the pictures of Ireland had been taken off the walls of their wood cabin and stored in a box in the shed her father had built for the specific purpose of storing boxes with photos of Ireland in it, and of other mementos. One black-and-white Castlecomer dell remained in a frame in the hall.

A colossal vat of frightful things was stirred up by Kenny
Devine's vagrant life and subsequent (or consequent?) demise. For one, the Chevy truck he crashed his speeding, swerving rattletrap into belonged to Blake and Mason's dad. On the way home from work, Burt Haul had stopped at Brucie's Diner to pick up some meatloaf on Monday special. It was eight in the evening in July, not yet dark.

Burt survived because his truck, built like a Humvee, had been in second gear. The same could not be said of Kenny or his Dodge Charger. Eyewitnesses, unreliable but myriad, clocked his miles per hour at somewhere between seventy and a hundred and twenty. He had no chance.

Burt lived, but barely. He suffered three broken vertebrae, a punctured lung, and five broken ribs. His kneecap, hip, and femur were crushed almost beyond repair. It was upon visiting Burt in the convalescent facility that Moody first noted how blessed were those who could push around their own wheelchairs. Burt could not.

His livelihood depended on his truck and his able body. When he wasn't driving the school bus, he was a handyman. After four months in recovery, he found himself on a disability pension, still unable to walk. Janice Haul got a job at the attendance office at Brownfield Elementary School, but it barely paid half the bills. Little by little Burt improved, but was never the same. He couldn't sit behind the wheel of a bus anymore, his fused and compressed vertebrae barking so loud they required handfuls of Oxycontin to quieten, and how well could anyone drive a school bus numbed up on Oxy?

Until Burt got well enough to sit behind the wheel, he was replaced by a Brian Hansen, a recent Vermont transplant, and apparently an excellent driver.

Jimmy Devine's animosity toward his brother, whose reckless existence had set into motion the spinning wheels of unforgiving fate, was so violent that it ate apart the bond with his own family. He blamed Moody for never reining Kenny in, for indulging him, spoiling him, coddling him, paying his
tickets, his suspended-license fees, his legal bills, bailing him out of jail, buying him new wheels, allowing him to live in her basement and drink her liquor. “Not just a good man's back, but a whole family has been shattered, all because you could never say no to him,” was one of the accusations Jimmy hurled at his mother, way back when. Burt and Jimmy and their families had been close before the accident, then less so, and then hardly at all. Burt blamed Jimmy for his ruined life, for knowing that Kenny should've never been allowed to drive and yet doing nothing. “How much more could I do?” Jimmy argued in his defense. “Kenny's license had been permanently suspended!”

And then, three years later, Jimmy blamed not only Kenny for yet another tragedy, but also Burt for not being man enough to get up every morning and drive the bus. It didn't matter to Jimmy the pain Burt was in. In his turn, Burt didn't appreciate (to say the least) being blamed for Kenny Devine's sins. Living three houses apart, the Hauls and the Devines stayed barely civil, even though Lang kept trying to point out in feeble attempts to effect a truce that Burt had done nothing wrong.

“Nothing wrong,” Jimmy said, “except stroll out of Brucie's Diner with his arms full of meatloaf at precisely and absolutely the worst moment. Nothing wrong except not go back to work, and ruin everybody's fucking life.”

“He's suffering too, Jimmy.”

“That's why I said
everybody's
fucking life, Mother.”

Chloe and Moody stood shoulder to shoulder near two graves in the small rural cemetery under the pines as tall and gray as emerald redwoods. Chloe placed all the flowers they had brought in front of a black granite tombstone that read J
AMES
P
ATRICK
D
EVINE
J
R
.
1998–2001.

Moody made her put half of them on Kenny's stupid grave. Chloe didn't want to.

They stood with their heads bent. Moody held on to Chloe's arm.

“Do you come here with your mother?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often does she come?”

“I don't know.” The grave site was beautifully tended, weeded, neatened, full of flowering azaleas, faded lilacs, knockabout roses. “Often, from the looks of it.”

“Your dad?”

“When Mom forces him.”

Moody nodded. “You have to forgive Uncle Kenny,” she said. “It's not his fault he was born with bad genes and couldn't walk straight. Not everybody can make a life like your mom and dad, child. Not everybody can push his own wheelchair. You'll find this out. Some aren't so lucky.”

“I found this out. Like my brother wasn't lucky.”

“Yes. Like him. But he was lucky to be loved. That love is better than hate for my Kenny. No question Kenny did wrong. But it wasn't
all
his fault. Sometimes catastrophic things just happen. Your father doesn't understand that.”

Moody bent her head deeper. Chloe too. “He understands,” she said. “But that's not what happened here. A catastrophic thing didn't just happen.”

They stood.

“What was the poem you used to recite to Jimmy? He knew it by heart. You and he were so cute with it. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Something about Santa, and vampires. Come on. You do remember. Tell your grandmother. It's a sin to lie to old people.”

“I don't remember, Moody.” Chloe ground her teeth. She didn't tell, though she well remembered.

I wonder if Santa Claus is real

The Easter Bunny

The Tooth Fairy too

I wonder if ghosts really say boo

I wonder if leprechauns collect pots of gold

I wonder if vampires ever grow old.

Little Jimmy, who used to yell YES for the first five and an emphatic NO to the last, had been conceived around the time of Uncle Kenny's death. Her parents had been trying for little Jimmy all of Chloe's life. For all she knew,
she
was supposed to be little Jimmy, and they had been trying for nine years before she was born and for eleven after. In some ways her mother was very much a Chinese mother. Two decades of trying for that one highly valued masculine child. Jimmy lived for three very good years. Their little cabin in the woods was full of noise and tricycles and paint on the walls and mess everywhere, and Lang didn't care, and Jimmy didn't care. Jimmy came home at six o'clock sharp every night, punctual as Big Ben. Lang called the Fryeburg police station a dozen times a day. Jimmy, you won't believe what your son just said, Jimmy, you'll never guess what your son just did.

When it was time for little Jimmy to go to nursery school, he was so excited to be taking the big-boy school bus. He would jump with joy off the curb when he saw the blue bus pulling up to take him home. One early afternoon Brian Hansen's wallet had fallen into the footwell. He noticed it when he was in the parking lot, about to pull up. He bent down to retrieve it. He was driving so slowly. He thought he could take his eyes off the road for just a second. But Jimmy was little and his bones were greensticks. They were no match for a school bus, even a small one, even a slow one.

Lang was at ShopRite buying fruit snacks and juice boxes. Big Jimmy was in a meeting about police logistics for the upcoming
summer festival. Chloe was in ninth-grade math, dreaming of a tuna sandwich she was about to eat for lunch.

Had Uncle Kenny not broken Burt's back, Burt would have been driving the blue bus as he had been driving it for thirteen years. Burt never would have taken his eyes off the road. But Kenny did break Burt's back. And with Burt out of action, the town had hired an out-of-towner with “very good credentials” to drive over the little ones to and fro.

Afterward, Burt didn't care how bad his back was. Though big Jimmy said it was one fucking day too late, Burt stuck a syringe of cortisone into his thigh three times a week and got behind the wheel of the bus until the town gently retired him, because every time he went over a pothole, he cried out in such anguish that the little kids shrieked in terror. Fryeburg had to either repair the town's potholes or golden-shake Burt's hand. The second option was cheaper.

On Jimmy's tombstone: T
HE
L
ORD GIVETH AND THE
L
ORD TAKETH AWAY
.

Other repercussions: three years ago, Mason comforted Chloe by taking her hand one summer night and becoming her boyfriend.

Still other repercussions: instead of Barcelona, Chloe was headed to an orphanage in Latvia. Damn Uncle Kenny to all hell.

After it happened, Lang did not come out of her house for five months. Then she bought a sewing machine, learned how to stitch herself bright new clothes, and staggered on. She bought a heat gun and heat-cured paints and took up painting life-sized dolls, the height of a small girl, or perhaps a boy. She made fifty of them, and then sold them on consignment, immersing herself in gardening with Chloe instead. The money from the fifty dolls was still dribbling in. And now Lang was giving some of it to Chloe to go to Latvia to search for another life-sized boy.